Programs that call chooseviewer.py to view documents fail to open the .html files. Of particular note are calls from blblastout.py to open BLAST reports sent to html files.

This worked on Linux, but not MacOSX.

The htmlfiles were being created, and chooseviewer.py was copying them to files named chooseviewerxxxxxx.html, but the application to read them was not being launched.

The problem seems to be that on OSX the way to over a file is

open -a appname

where appname is the name of the program eg. firefox

Chooseviewer reads the command to use for a particular file from an environment variable. On linux, these are always single non-blank strings, but on OSX they are multi-token strings eg.

open -a firefox

chooseviewer.py has been modified to first parst the results of environment variables such as $BL_Browser into a list of tokens, and then append the target filename to that list. That list then gets sent to subprocess.Popen to run the command.